Search Results

“... be real in living’. ‘I was not aware of being miserable,’ she explained, ‘for I never read through these notes, I simply wrote them in response to some blind impulse. But gradually they seem to have led me to realise that something was the matter.’ Nervous that the diary would simply encourage her tendency to wallow in a ‘bog of ...”

“... and Gary Snyder on whom Cathay made such an impact, British poets as different from each other as Donald Davie and Jeremy Prynne, Objectivists like Oppen and Reznikoff, and of course the whole group of poets associated with Black Mountain College – Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan and Charles Olson. Of all these it was Charles Olson ...”

“... texts, the Lotus Sutra – and his vast Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism were read by Thoreau, Emerson, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wagner (who left an unfinished ‘Buddhist’ opera at his death), among many others. Burnouf’s Buddha was neither idol nor god, but the teacher of a humanist philosophy which, unlike the Hindu ...”

“... to die than Europeans. The pandemic had some influence on the lives of everyone alive today. Donald Trump’s grandfather Friedrich died from it in New York City. He was 49. His early death meant that his fortune passed to his son Fred, who used it to start a New York property empire. My wife’s great-grandmother died from it in Verona; her ...”

“... most familiar point of entry. Such moments may also provide their most compelling inducements to read on: No resolve about places, the latch-key to our drifting lives, seems relevant without this smallest notion of dust. How to purge the dismal objection to this, remains a question. Not to be answered, but used, as a metabolic regulator: pulse rate, place ...”

“... I could have extracted it from the show’s credit sequence – except that you can never quite read the credits: the lettering is small, and it is presented in a kind of hypnotic vortex with distracting glimpses of the story breathing behind it. The credit sequence is less information than nightmare art – a cross between Magritte and Schiele. (This is ...”

“... verses, a black page, a page which says nothing but blen blen blen, a page which has to be read in the mirror: Sterne stuff. But it also gives us Bustrolists of ‘words that read differently in the mirror’: Live/evil, drab/bard, Dog/God; and the Confessions of a Cuban Opinion Eater; and How to kill an ...”

“... entirely respectable. But what we have here is neither careful nor spirited. That Dr Grimble has read, unevenly, but in places deeply, if without system or critical faculty, is shown by confused echoes of other people’s research. It is implied that he feels deeply about the wrongs experienced by Highland society over the centuries, but the extreme ...”

“... The springtime fun​ of watching Donald Trump humiliate and eliminate his Republican rivals has now been ruined by his victory over Hillary Clinton on 8 November. The polls had it that he would only be able to wreck one party. Now he has wrecked both of them. The upshot is that Clinton will never have the chance to invade Syria or reverse climate change and the Republicans have lucked into the sort of power they haven’t enjoyed in a decade ...”

“... unargued de-attribution could be almost as incautious a proceeding as its opposite has been. Donald Bond’s splendid edition of the Spectator first appeared in 1965, and has been standard since then. Its reissue, along with the first proper modern edition of the Tatler, coincided with Bond’s 90th birthday. The earlier journal is slightly more ...”

“... anxiously – and accurately – to his agent, on the opening of Small Craft Warnings in 1971. Donald Spoto believes the story he has pieced together reveals his subject ‘as a man more disturbing, more dramatic, richer and more wonderful than any character he ever created’. This orotund declaration is simply irrelevant, and it does less than justice to ...”

“... return to London. Around this time he had begun working on his translations from the Iliad with Donald Carne-Ross, and published a poem in the New Statesman grandly titled ‘To My Fellow Artists’. He found the atmosphere in London exhilarating, admiring the work, like Look Back in Anger, being staged at the Royal Court, and the Free Cinema movement ...”

“... Or you could – virtually speaking – sit in a quiet corner by yourself and read the newspaper. The possibilities are endless. The web browser as we know it, with hyperlinks you can follow simply by clicking on them, drop-down menus, scroll bars and – crucially – pictures, was invented in 1992 by Marc Andreessen, an undergraduate at ...”

“... instinct fails as to which structures are sound. If you want a 20-storey building that looks like Donald Duck, a lotus flower or a piece of crumpled paper, a computer helps with calculations, working drawings, templates and so on. In the new music centre the pre and post-industrial won’t have to accommodate each other. In the Baltic – as in Tate Modern ...”

“... of Konstanz in the 1960s.Pater reportedly told his students that ‘the great thing is to read authors whole; read Plato whole; read Kant whole; read Mill whole.’ Yet it has scarcely been possible to ...”